the Department of Health and Social Care. Chief Medical Officer In June 2010 Davies was appointed interim Chief Medical Officer (United Kingdom) and was confirmed as the permanent holder of that position the following year – the first woman to hold the post. The Chief Medical Officer has a rank equivalent to Permanent secretary – the highest in the Civil Service. The 'Chief' in the job title strictly refers to the incumbent's position as the most senior doctor within the Civil Service – the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Work and Pensions, for example, both employ doctors as civil servants, as of course does the Department of Health. Despite the name, the post of Chief Medical Officer has traditionally had no particular status within the medical profession as a whole – it has some parallels with the position of Surgeon General of the United States in the USA. However, with the huge expansion in the Department of Health's purview over the past two decades, the postholder has acquired substantial practical information influence over National Health Service policy. Unusually for a British Chief Medical Officer, Davies does not have a background as a specialist in public health. Nevertheless, Davies has written and spoken extensively about the rise of antimicrobial resistance in medicine and animal husbandry, including carrying out work to raise its profile on the international scene. Davies delegated authoring and editing her statutory annual reports to other doctors and healthcare practitioners, although she wrote an introduction to each and oversaw their compilation. She is particularly concerned about excessive alcohol consumption, especially by young women – who, she told the BBC in 2013, "we know can only take about half the alcohol that men can" and so are more prone to liver damage as a result. In July 2013, she was asked by the BBC whether she had ever favoured female doctors in order to counterbalance discrimination against them as a group. Davies replied: "I probably do positively discriminate because, as the men appoint in their own image, so do I appoint in my own image. I like having bright sparky women around, so I do understand how difficult it can be for the men to actually challenge the stereotypes and think differently". In her 2014 annual report, Davies said that the government needed to make tackling obesity a national priority. The report also made recommended a national audit